About

Workshop Goals

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to explore the challenges and opportunities of applying social media to designing novel applications of collective intelligence, with a special focus on crowdsourcing and human computation. By emphasizing practical challenges and experiences with real-world applications, the workshop will stimulate the discussion on best practices in this quickly growing field.

Based on the successful experience of the previous workshop SoHuman 2012, this workshop will consider crowdsourcing and human computation in the broader context: as specific instantiations of collective intelligence and social computing on the web. The goal is to identify how experience gained from the design of crowdsourcing applications can inform the development of new approaches to collective intelligence, and vice versa: what lessons from the broader domain of collective intelligence can inform the design of new kinds of systems for crowdsourcing and human computation?

Theme & Topics

Both crowdsourcing and human computation consider humans as distributed task-solvers, leveraging human reasoning to solve complex tasks that are easy for individuals but difficult for purely computational approaches (human computation) or for traditional organizational work arrangements (crowdsourcing). Effective realizations of these paradigms typically require participation of a large number of distributed users over the Internet, a careful design of task structures, participation incentives and mechanisms for coordinating and aggregating results of individual participants into collective solutions.

Though rarely explicitly addressed as such, social media and related technologies often provide the enabling methods and technologies for the realization of such models. Examples include crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk), crowdsourcing service providers (e.g. Microtask, CrowdFlower) or games with a purpose. While centralized platforms are also at the core of “traditional” approaches to collective intelligence (e.g. Wikipedia), attention is increasingly turning to the possibilities of harnessing existing social platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) that already gather huge numbers of users into webs of social relationships. These new approaches to harnessing distributed social infrastructures on the web can enable the design of novel kinds of collective intelligence processes and applications.

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

Social media in collective intelligence systems

Use cases and applications of social media to crowdsourcing and human computation

Social incentive models for crowdsourcing and human computation

Social-network analysis for crowdsourcing and human computation

Applications of social media visualization to collective intelligence applications

Social coordination in crowdsourcing and human computation

Social search and human computation

Trust models for collective intelligence and crowdsourcing

Semantic modeling in crowdsourcing and human computation

Expert-based crowdsourcing

Influence metering and social trust models

Expertise-inference techniques and their application to task routing

Reputation systems for human computation

Quality assurance in distributed human intelligence tasks

Social sensing in crowdsourcing and human computation

Domain-specific challenges in crowdsourcing and human computation

Approach

Existing Social Clouds (such as Facebook, Twitter) pose both chances and challenges for new kinds of approaches to crowdsourcing and human computation in particular and to collective intelligence in general. On one hand, the intricate social relationships allow the development of new kinds of task routing mechanisms (e.g. identifying the best or most trusted participants for a specific task). Incentive structures are intrinsically social and tend to reflect community-like phenomena (e.g. the reputation economy), thus differing strongly from single-user approaches in classical crowdsourcing. This is already leading to early experiments such as expert-based crowdsourcing or solutions for task-injection across distributed social platforms. On the other hand, the design of such socially distributed computing structures relates the fields of crowdsourcing and human computation to the lessons from a broader class of collective intelligence platforms and applications.

The need to interrelate these fields is reflected in questions such as:

How can we design effective incentive systems for large-scale participation of human users in structured collective intelligence systems?

How do we design tasks at different levels of complexity that can be solved reliably through a composition of individual contributions?

How can we use intricate webs of social relationships of existing social platforms for new models of coordination in distributed task-solving?

How can distributed social media enable to the design of new classes of crowdsourcing applications (e.g. using social network analysis for new ways of task-routing)?

How can the comparison of lessons from distributed problem-solving in human computation and community-based approaches lead to novel classes of collective intelligence applications?

Expected Contributions

The workshop will solicit contributions from diverse scientific disciplines regarding different domains and types of applications emphasizing crowdsourcing, human computation and collective intelligence systems enabled by social media as used in practice (i.e. in the light of specific problems and application scenarios). We are especially interested in novel applications to a range of domains such as collective action and social deliberation, multimedia search and exploration, enterprise and medical applications, cultural heritage, social data analysis or citizen science. This also includes open social networks involving different user groups in heterogeneous settings (e.g. end-users, businesses, scientists, citizens, policy makers). By highlighting the importance of domain-specific challenges and specific use cases we can also enrich a technology-driven perspective with a user-centered view and system-level social dynamics.

Target Audience

The workshop is of interest to:

researchers and practitioners concerned with the development and evaluation of methods, technologies and applications for crowdsourcing and human computation, and

researchers and practitioners in social media, web science and related fields working on the design, analysis and/or evaluation of collective intelligence approaches and applications.

To ensure reaching the different audiences and participants the workshop organizers and the program committee involve experienced representatives from different fields in academic and business research.

The Handbook of Human Computation, bridges scientific communities, capturing and integrating the unique perspective and achievements of each. It coalesces contributions from industry and across related disciplines in order to motivate, define, and anticipate the future of this exciting new frontier in science and cultural evolution.